Murder at the 42nd Street Library: A Mystery (Thomas Dunne Book) (6 page)

She thought about herself and those like her moving in and probably displacing families with kids like him. He reminded her of the children she’d worked with when she was in high school, teaching underprivileged kids to read. Actually, she’d been teaching poor kids to read since elementary school—her mother-hen complex. Her friends used to tell her she’d grow up to be the old woman who lived in a shoe. But she wasn’t the old woman who lived in a shoe. She didn’t have so many children she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t have any children at all. She didn’t have anyone now since her mother died. She was alone and she wondered if this boy was an orphan, too.

He was a fixture in the neighborhood. She’d see him often, one afternoon on Tenth Avenue, wearing the uniform of the neighborhood Catholic school, another time in the evening headed down Ninth Avenue carrying a bag of groceries from the fruit market at 57th Street. He was always alone—even coming from school he wasn’t part of the groups of noisy, scrambling kids who burst out onto the sidewalk when school let out—and she never saw him smile, except for that moment in the library.

For this evening, she put on a pair of old leather boots, one of the few of her mother’s possessions she’d kept—the pair she used to borrow when she was young and the boots were new—and went to search out the shoeshine boy. It took more than an hour, marching down one side of Ninth Avenue as far as 42nd Street and back up the other side almost to Columbus Circle. She went by a bar where guys were outside smoking enough times to be propositioned. She was afraid if she went by it again someone would grab her and drag her inside, assuming she was playing hard to get. Finally, she saw the boy, standing in front of a different bar as though screwing up his courage to enter.

She approached him, smiling. “How much to shine these boots?”

He wrinkled his eyebrows examining the boots and then her face. His eyes were squinted closed and he spoke in a shy mumble. She had to ask him to repeat what he’d said.

“Whatever you want to pay.”

“Oh,” said Adele. “I have no idea what it should cost. I’ve never had a shoeshine.”

The boy shrugged his shoulders, sinking into his jacket. He was tongue-tied, painfully shy. How did he find any customers?

“How does five dollars sound?”

The boy’s face brightened and he nodded.

The only way she could think of for him to get at her boots was to lean against the wall next to the bar like she’d seen the guys doing. Now, she did feel like a streetwalker.

“What’s your name?” she asked as he puttered around in his box, getting out tins of polish, brushes, and rags.

He mumbled an answer she didn’t hear, but she chose not to ask him to repeat it.

She started to ask how old he was but got angry with herself for asking dumb, adult-to-kid questions a maiden aunt would ask. “You’ve got quite a kit there,” she tried. “And you’re so young to be working so hard. Did your dad teach you to shine shoes?”

In answer, he mumbled something again, so she resolved to not ask him any more questions until she got him to relax. She began by telling him she was new in the neighborhood and used to live in Brooklyn, and babbled on until he seemed to relax into his work. After a bit, she asked how long he’d been in the neighborhood.

He shrugged.

“Do you live here with your family?’

“My mom.”

“Do you like living here? Do you like school?” There she was again with the Aunt Mable questions. Even though the boy hardly answered a question, she could see that he warmed to the attention.

She wanted to know more about him. There was no denying he was poor, and probably neglected if he was out on the street by himself at all hours drifting among the bars and the drunks and the nightlife. It wasn’t right. She had a good mind to march the boy back to his home and confront his mother. But really, she had no right to. He was out on the street at night. That might be a violation of something, but this was New York. It took a lot more than that to get someone’s attention. And he did go to the Catholic school, so that meant something. Then there were the horror stories about child protective services taking kids away from their mothers and dumping them God knows where. Butting in without knowing the whole situation, she could easily make things worse.

She tried again with his name and finally got that it was Johnny … no last name, though. If she could get his full name, she might find a way to check on him without causing trouble. Eventually, she got it out of him—Smith. For a moment, she suspected he made it up, said the first name that came into his head. But he wasn’t evasive; he didn’t seem to want to keep anything from her. He mumbled because he was shy. He smiled now, cautiously warming to her like a stray pup wary of even an act of kindness. She gave him the five dollars. She would have given him more—ten, twenty—but held herself back lest she come across as too strange and scare him away. She did tell him he’d done a great job and she had another pair of boots that needed polishing and would look for him again in a few days.

Chapter 5

The following Monday, Adele knocked on the crime fiction reading room door late in the afternoon. Ambler had spent most of the day—after updating his notebook on the James Donnelly murder—cataloging the contents of six file boxes from the collection of a 1920s mystery writer whose work had been out of print for decades. Like most of the donated collections, it was haphazardly thrown together by a family member and dumped at the library, with no one having much of an idea of what was in the boxes, much less where anything was.

“Nelson Yates is sitting in the park behind the library. He didn’t know who I was.”

“I’m cataloging,” Ambler said, as if that would explain everything. He got up and followed her.

Behind the library, the spindly green café chairs were scattered along the slate walks among the ivy, the daffodils, and budding sycamore trees. The center lawn of the park was still roped off. Nelson Yates, an ancient, solitary figure, sat by himself on one of the café chairs alongside the open-air library. The sun had sunk behind the buildings and the breeze was chilly. He was bent over, coughing, smoking a cigarette, watching a Ping-Pong game at the tables alongside 42nd Street.

“Nelson,” Ambler said. “Is everything all right?”

Yates turned his watery gray eyes on Ambler. His expression was blank. “I’m watching my son play Ping-Pong. I didn’t know he could play. I never taught him.”

“Don’t you think it’s time to get home?” Adele asked. “Your wife will be looking for you.”

“Lisa?” His expression grew troubled. “Lisa left me years ago.”

Adele looked confused. “Mary. Your wife’s name is Mary.”

He turned to watch the Ping-Pong players, silent long enough for Ambler to think he’d forgotten about them, which he had. Adele called his name.

When he turned, she asked, “Would you like us to call your wife?”

“My son will take me home when he finishes.”

Ambler waited a moment. “That’s not your son, Nelson. You’re here at the 42nd Street library. We were talking a couple of days ago about the papers you donated to the library … and Max Wagner.”

Yates snapped to attention. “Don’t talk to me about that prick. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“You tell him I know what he did and not to come near me again.”

“What did he do?”

Yates stared at him. His expression darkened.

Ambler resisted asking another question.

“Edgar! Edgar!” Yates hollered at the group of young guys—some black, some white, some Asian—at the two Ping-Pong tables. They played aggressively, slamming the ball back and forth, but laughed a lot, shaking hands, bumping fists at the end of a game. The protocol was that the player who won kept the table and a new opponent challenged him. The person who lost stood on the sidelines for a few minutes, cheerfully chatting with the other guys and two women who showed up, and was soon back playing at the other table. The winner moved on after a bit also and eventually wound up at that other table, too.

When Yates rose and moved toward the tables, calling for Edgar, the players glanced uneasily at each other and tried to ignore him. Adele intercepted him. As she did, he seemed to notice the cold shoulder he got from the young men and hesitated.

“I’m not remembering right,” he mumbled, as Adele steered him back toward the library. When Ambler came up alongside them, Nelson was at first suspicious but soon relaxed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I lost my bearings for a moment.” He turned to Ambler. “Have we been drinking?”

“No,” said Ambler. “Would you like a drink?”

By the time they got to the Library Tavern, Nelson was lucid. From his wariness, it was likely he didn’t remember the last hour or so and was keeping a close eye on him and Adele to see what they knew about what he’d been doing.

Finding an empty bar stool near the door, they parked Adele on it, Ambler standing to one side of her, Yates the other. McNulty took their order, beers for Adele and Ambler, bourbon on ice for Yates. The bar was packed, so no time for visiting with McNulty.

“Would you like me to call your wife?” Adele asked.

Nelson took a long drink, draining his glass, his eyes clouding with his thoughts again. His expression was sullen as he ordered another bourbon. In a determined, almost angry, tone, he said, “I’d like to sit here drinking until the bar closes.” He stared at his glass. When he spoke again, it was quietly. “I have memory problems. I imagine you’ve noticed … dementia. Not a good thing for a writer.”

Ambler asked about his most recent book. Talking about his writing, he was more animated. Like most writers, he was more inclined to talk about the market, the consolidation of the publishing industry, the closing of too many independent bookstores, than he was in talking about his craft or evaluating his fellow writers. While he talked, he drank steadily, ordering refills while Ambler and Adele sipped their beers.

After a while, he grew melancholy. “When you get to be as old as I am, you have many regrets.”

“You mentioned your son,” Ambler said, aware of his own regrets.

“Son? Edgar … the dutiful son. Nothing wrong with him, he’s a musician here in the city, plays the viola for the ballet. My daughter Emily is the regret.” He motioned to McNulty. “One more of these.”

McNulty looked troubled as he poured the drink.

“Is your daughter here in the city?” Adele asked

“I don’t know where she is. She ran away—when she was fifteen.”

“I’m so sorry,” Adele said.

“I found her and brought her back. She wouldn’t stay. She was lost.”

Ambler remembered some of what happened with Yates’s daughter. It was a tabloid scandal twenty years ago and took a toll on Nelson. He went crazy looking for her. His marriage broke up. He stopped writing, drank heavily—which he was doing right now, slugging down one bourbon on ice after another.

“I thought of something today.” He turned to Ambler. “I meant to ask Harry but I forgot. I do that a lot.” The melancholy was gone, replaced by a lip-smacking kind of friendliness you might see in an old farmer who wasn’t around other people all that often. “In the library, you have records and databases and such things. Someone who knew how to use those databases could track down my daughter pretty easily, I’d bet.”

“Someone might,” Ambler said. “Not me. I’m an archivist.” He looked to Adele. She was quiet, watching.

“Emily didn’t want to see me.” Yates spoke to the space in front of him or to McNulty at the far end of the bar making a drink. “I wrote to her, begged her. It was a mistake.” He reached out across Adele and clasped Ambler’s arm. “I want the letters back.” The grip on Ambler’s forearm was surprisingly strong.

So that was it—the scandal. Nelson didn’t want what happened with his daughter to be rehashed in his biography, or at least he wanted control over how it was handled. Max Wagner, on the other hand, would be salivating over it. Nelson released his grip. You could see the wisdom in his expression—too smart to try to outsmart someone who’d already come up with the answer.

He stared into space again before he spoke. “If Max realizes Emily has the letters, he’ll try to get them from her.”

“Why would she give them to him?”

Nelson waved off the question. “She was quite taken with him when she was a young girl. I don’t know what she’d think now.”

Ambler said he’d see what he could find out about the missing girl and was about to ask about James Donnelly when Nelson lowered his head until it was inches above his rocks glass, like a junky nodding off. In the short time they’d been in the bar, he’d had five or six drinks, and they’d hit him quickly. He was drunk.

With Adele’s help, he piled the aging writer into a cab, and they headed for 78th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam. The ride was uneventful, except when Nelson revived and insisted the cab stop at a liquor store on Amsterdam before they reached his street. Ambler had misgivings, but Nelson insisted, so he got his way and the cab stopped. At 78th Street, after asking the cab driver to wait, Adele and Ambler walked him up the stoop of the brownstone building and waited while he fumbled for his keys.

Just as he got the key in the lock, the door opened and a trim, pretty, but sour-faced woman opened the door. She looked to be thirty years younger than Yates.

“Good evening, Mary,” Yates said gallantly. “I’d like you to meet—”

“Oh my God,” she said, her hand going to cover her mouth. “Good God,” she shrieked. “You haven’t let him drink, have you?” She stared at them, one hand covering her mouth, the other holding the edge of the door.

Ambler and Adele stared back at her until Adele broke the silence. “Obviously, he’s been drinking. We helped him get home. We’re not his keepers.”

“He’s not supposed to drink. His condition—”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m a child,” Yates said. “And don’t be discourteous to my friends.” For the moment, he seemed to have regained sobriety, his diction precise, though he wobbled and swayed, unsteady on his feet.

“Look at yourself. You’re—” Mary Yates couldn’t find the words. Her mouth moved but nothing came out, her face twisted into a mask of disgust.